Exclusive: One year on, Canva is seeing success with its partner program

Rob Giglio sits down with CRN Australia and discusses the year that’s been and the year to come.

It has been more than a year since Canva launched its inaugural partner program globally and Rob Giglio, chief customer officer is proud of how the company has fared in its first twelve months.

The Aussie company started with 11 partners globally and now has 60 partners with Giglio noting there is at least 1200 customers transacting through their channel partners.

Closer to home, Canva has seven active partners in ANZ, with Brent Irwin as the sole channel lead.

The team has more than doubled globally over the year with nine people in the Canva channel department.

Giglio said they could have more partners, but they are being selective with who they are working with.

“We're trying to be thoughtful about working with the right partners who have the right scale and the right focus,” he said.

“We'd have a lot more partners but 60 feels pretty good given where we started a year ago.”

Looking at the first year, Giglio said the partner program is doing what it is supposed to do.

“When we got started, we were optimistic, but we didn't know how this was going to work,” he explained.

“If you look at Canva, it's a very inexpensive product. One of the things that's very challenging for channel partners is when you have a single thing that doesn't cost very much. That's hard for resellers to get their heads around.”

Giglio noted that if the seat price is low, they question the profitability of the product.

“The only way they make money is they land a big footprint, so that it's lots of seats, and that's harder work than selling a single seat,” he added.

But Giglio explained that their reseller partners have cracked the code and are “doing big deals”.

“The fact they're making money working with Canva tells me we have figured out how to sell big footprints,” he said.

In terms of how the partner program has impacted Canva’s revenue, Giglio noted that from Canva’s enterprise sales motion about 10 percent of the lead volume is coming in from something that was touched by some kind of partner.

The chief customer officer gives his reasoning on why he thinks the past year was so successful.

The first, he acknowledges is the Canva reseller staff.

“We hired some good people to lead this. I would give a lot of credit to our reseller sales team, they came from working in the channel. They understand the channel firsthand,” he said.

Giglio noted by working with a select number of partners it helped them nurture better deals.

“It allows us to get in and go like shoulder to shoulder on these deals,” he said.

“We're involved in the sales motion with almost every single one of these, and so we're not just relying on the channel partner to do all the all the work. We're co-selling and that co-sell motion helps.”

The last factor is enabling those partners to think outside the box with where Canva can be used.

"We sparked their thinking about where Canva could live in their end customers. The deals that resellers are bringing us are deals that we probably wouldn't have seen otherwise, and they're seeing them,” Giglio explained.

“They're seeing the patterns, and then they're coming to us, and then we're working together to sell it.”

Speaking to their partners over the past year, one of the only pieces of feedback Giglio constantly receives is about the price of the product.

“They all say they wish the product was more expensive because they do believe that it could command a higher price point,” he explained.

“What they mean is ‘we could make a lot more margin selling your product, if your product was more expensive’,” he explained.

Regardless of the comments, Giglio said they will not be changing the prices for the sake of changing prices.

“Part of the charm of Canva is that it's approachable in its price point,” he said.

“We're thoughtful about not just jacking up prices.”

Global expansion

Part of the channel plan was expanding into channel-first markets like Japan and Korea, which Giglio said has been a positive experience.

"We don’t have many Canva people in in these countries, and yet we're generating real, meaningful revenue,” he said.

“Because it starts to get momentum, from a business model standpoint, allows you to afford to put someone in that country to now work directly with customers.”

Giglio noted there will be a modest growth to APAC staff in the coming year, but right now feels like they have the correct number of people.

“What I probably would have more of is additional people in region to help post sale, to help with implementation and active use,” he said.

“Rather than obsessing on finding a customer and selling them more people to help customers be more successful with the product, because when they are, they tend to expand like crazy, and that's good for the resellers.”

Giglo also wants a deeper footprint in Latin America and Europe.

“We're in Brazil, and I feel good about that. I'd like to work with more partners in Latin America, places like Peru, Argentina, Colombia,” he added.

“I would like to see us expand our partner network in more of Europe, like in the Nordics and Benelux. We have a pretty good partner footprint in Asia, I feel good about where we are in Southeast Asia and Japan.”

Pro-channel

For the year ahead, Giglio said Canva is “doubling down” for its channel business.

“In our maturity curve, working with partners is just a really smart way to grow,” he said.

He noted that this is in comparison to those who are “anti-channel”.

“There are some software providers that are pulling back on margins, and there are some software providers that are requiring the resellers to do more of the work all themselves, and are not as interested in co-selling and working together, primarily due to channel conflict,” he said.

“They've set up situations that have channel conflict, and we've consciously gone out of our way to avoid channel conflict.”